The Messy Book – The Climb #784

Friday 16^th April 2021

I’m not sure if it’s the remnants of side effects or not, but I’ve been feeling a bit negative today. I’m not sure why but I find I can be when I feel a bit run down.

I finished off chapter 1 of The Accursed and made a start on writing up the synopsis. I’ve got the tense to change in chapter 2 tomorrow, and my mind is flowing with ideas for a chapter 4. Yet how I perceive the project pales with how I imagine the finished book. I get like this at points, I think all authors do. It’s when they think they can’t write, the words feel like treacle or they are so bogged down with words it feels overwhelming.

Pre-writing has been weird. Because it’s such a small sample, I’ve been all over the place. It hasn’t been efficient, and part of me thinks it shouldn’t be. I’m trying to find the story here. I’m trying to find texture, tone as well as character and plot. I’m impressed with my worldbuilding. It’ll probably need tweaking in revisions but it’s interesting and the magic system is neat. The characters I worry about. I want them to be morally grey. I want them to learn and evolve. As a result, some of those characters are in interesting places.

Today they felt flat on the page. Sometimes that happens once they’ve lived in my head for a while and I’ve got to know them. Some days when I’m feeling a bit drained or flat, they lose their sparkle. It can be easily fixed. They might need their personalities plumped a bit but I think the groundwork is there.

Writing the synopsis also has me worried that the story isn’t good enough. This is a real mental hang up for me currently. I feel like I need to bat it out of the park when what I need is a home run. There’s a lot of characters in this book and I worry that a lot of them don’t really have their own arcs. Some of that will come out in the writing I suspect, but I’m worried this will be a messy book with me writing all over and then rewriting and rewriting.

I’d be more worried if I wasn’t being so negative outside of the book. Today has felt glum and I’ve been a bit grouchy. Medical conditions I have can leave me feeling drained, and I know on days they do, I act similarly. I just have to power through and get work done, and ignore my negativity for a day whilst my energy rebuilds.

I’ve got a lot riding on this project and that pressure can drag me down if I’m not careful. I should be back to 100% in the next couple of days and hopefully the project will look a little more realistic.